Step Seven: Content Grouping

Content Grouping

After setting up priority conversions and core GA4 events, continue to migrate your key customizations, such as content groups to categorize pages and screens and allow high-level comparisons of metrics.

Key Tasks

• Create a content grouping using the Google tag.
• Create a content grouping using the GTM.
• Create a content grouping using GA for Firebase. 
• Validate content groupings.

GA3 Content Grouping UI

Overview

Content groups allow the categorization of pages or screens into similar groups, revealing metrics for related groups of information. For large blogs, the content groups can reveal relative performance for different types of content posts. For ecommerce sites, different product types can be grouped for reviewing metrics for each product line or category. By providing group-level performance comparisons, GA can help identify areas to drill down and gain more insights.

While the UA platform provided content grouping setup within the UI, GA4 requires a manual but simple method of tagging pages with content variables.  As a result, the comparisons are viewable in the Pages and Screens report, or any Exploration report selecting the content group dimension.

Content Groups with Google Tag Parameters

To create content groups of web pages, use the Google tag to directly apply specific content groups to pages. The syntax for applying content groups is below.

gtag('set', 'content_group', '<name_of_content_group>');

For example, if you wanted to identify a page as belonging to the mens clothing group, you could apply this tag:

 gtag('set', 'content_group', 'mens');

The content group parameter can be applied globally or for a specific data stream.

Content Groups with GTM Variables

To create content groups of web pages with Google Tag Manager (GTM), you must first create a GTM variable, and then add the variable to your GA4 Config tag.

Create a Variable

1. In GTM, select Variables.
2. In User-Defined Variables > New
3. In Variable Configuration > Regex Table
4. Rename the variable as “Content Group"
5. In the Input Variable field, select "Page Path" in double brackets (}})
6. Add a row to the RegEx Table section
7. Enter a regular expression to identify page path.

For example, you may add an entire path such as www.example.com/headphones to capture page activity belonging to the headphone category. However, because regular expressions can include variations, you can add multiple matches as in the below example. Note, in the Advanced Settings, Full Matches is disabled so that partial matches will be grouped in Accessories or Players content groups. In the example below, the pipe symbol (|) separating adapter, headphone, and extension functions as the logical OR operation.

GTM Variable Creation UI

Add the Variable to the Tag

1. In GTM, click Tags > Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration tag to open your main config tag
2. In the Fields to Set section, add a row with the content group and variable:
   1. In the Field Name field, enter "content_group"
   2. In the Value field, enter "Content Group" in double brackets (}})
3. Save, test, and publish.

GTM GA4 Configuration Tag: Add Variable

Using path or modified path match works best when a website URL structure matches content groupings. However, a content_group variable can be based on any element that identifies page content. For example, if a content type value is captured in a Data Layer Variable, it can be retrieved and processed in GA4.